Tennyson : Notebook 'IV'

Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892

Tennyson

<p style='text-align: justify;'>A small post duodecimo notebook bound in half red sheep with brown marbled covers. Twenty-four leaves and the stubs of 38 leaves remain in the notebook, but the probability is that an entire gathering has been excised between folios 18 and 19, and that several additional leaves have been removed without trace. The probable date for Tennyson’s use of this notebook is circa 1832. There seems to be some doubt about the date of this notebook. Christopher Ricks alternatively dates it 1830 in his headnote and to 1832-3. The two halves of the notebook are upside down relative to each other, and it is conceivable that Tennyson wrote the half that is right side up relative to the foliation earlier—1830 or before—and the last half several years later. Internal evidence in the notebook neither supports nor specifically denies that hypothesis. The draft of 'Oenone' is still in a revisionary stage, though, and a copy of 'The Hesperides' (which is the first poem in the upside-down or last half of the notebook) was torn from the first half. Most of the poems in the notebook have only minor corrections and seem to have been confidently copied. If Tennyson copied these poems into this notebook from other places, he did so before the publication of 1833 (i.e., before December, 1832), as the variants in the 'Oenone' draft show.</p>